Aboard ships or other watercraft, fiber optic infrastructure is installed in cableways using hangers for protection and routing. During shipbuilding, fiber optic cables are generally installed by either manually pulling the cables through the cableways or blowing them through micro-duct with compressed air. With both methods, the fiber cable is installed in the cableway without terminations/connectors.
Fiber optic terminations generally have highly polished ceramic end faces to provide optimal optical transmission and, as such, are extremely prone to damage by physical handling of the fiber cable ends during the pull-through process. Installation limitations generally require the optical fibers to be terminated, after routing, in-situ by hand, and prevent pre-termination of the fiber in a controlled manufacturing environment with precise process control.
The optical fiber termination process is very complex, in some cases having as many as 35 discrete steps, and many of the steps need to be performed to exacting tolerances in order to provide the desired performance levels and reliability. These steps make achieving high quality terminations difficult.
Further exacerbating the ability to achieve high quality terminations is the working environment aboard ships. The termination process typically occurs in confined areas and in heavily trafficked passageways making detailed precision assembly tasks more difficult to perform and highly prone to error.
Thus, there is a need for processes and advanced tools to simply and easily perform the termination process shipboard.